By now you're well and regrettably familiar with the Simmons/Grantland signature move, which is to liken a sport or its participants (NFL coaches, say) to a well-known pop culture artifact (Entourage, say) in a way which offers insight or comment on neither of them. To the extent that there ever really was any critical juice to be wrung out of examining this empty, masturbatory, hackneyed crap, those days are probably long gone. The Grantlanders do this shit; it sucks; we make fun of it on Twitter; they burrow deep into enormous piles of Disney money to idly tickle their own assholes in the dark.

Since Steve McPherson has framed his here-is-how-some-NBA-teams-are-like-characters-from-Breaking Bad-in-case-you-were-wondering-and-also-critically-hypoxic tract as a "thought exercise" (and, to be fair, you'll probably work up a nice brain-sweat just trying to grind your way through 2,700 words of this shit—"But questions still remain about Howard’s health and fit. It feels like it’s all right there but that’s exactly when it can be so far away" WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN), here's a parallel "thought exercise" you can perform while working your way through it: Tell me, for Christ's sake, why the fuck this thing exists. What the fuck point the author is trying to make, other than I am familiar with both the NBA and a popular television show. Who is it for? Does it illuminate the NBA for Breaking Bad fans? Does it illuminate Breaking Bad for NBA fans? Does it actually have anything to say about either of them, other than that the author is aware that both of them are internet catnip?